Memory as Philosophy

The Theory and Practice of Philosophical Recollection

Dustin Peone

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783838273365
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Dustin Peone argues that memory is the foundation of philosophical thought. This may seem strange to the contemporary reader, but it is something that philosophers themselves have known since before Socrates. Peone advocates a doctrine of "memory as philosophy" that ties philosophical recollection back to the wisdom of the Muses, daughters of Memory, who sing of "what was, is, and shall be."

Part One draws on the work of philosophers from Cicero to Vico to Bergson to articulate the meaning and significance of memory. Peone understands memory not merely in its psychological sense but as the key to metaphysical and moral thinking.

Part Two takes up the philosophical history of memory. Peone gives an overview of its role as both a speculative and technical instrument from ancient Greece through Renaissance Europe. Then with the rise of modernity and the critical philosophy of Descartes, the memory tradition falls into disrepute. Why did this happen? Was it accidental? Is a philosophical system grounded in memory possible after Descartes? In the final chapters, Montaigne and Hegel are analyzed as practitioners of "memory as philosophy" in the modern world.

PART ONE: THEORY

Section One: The Idea of Memory

Has it ever struck you, Connie, that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? It's really all memory, Connie, except for each passing moment.

Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge depends on memory. We have no knowledge antecedent to memory, and with memory all our knowledge begins. In the present section, I will explain in what manner I understand these claims, and I will offer a view of memory as the human faculty central to philosophy. There are five natural divisions of this section. The first, as decency demands of all written work, is an appeal to the wellsprings of the most ancient wisdom of the western world, the Muses and Isis. The second is a survey of what philosophical memory is not. Following this, the third will say what philosophical memory is. The fourth is a corollary: a philosophical doctrine of memory must be supplemented with a philosophical doctrine of forgetting. The fifth shows memory in its external relationships to the present world—that is, to those twin sisters, method and technology.

 

 

I: The Origins of Wisdom

The Muses

The earliest Greek wisdom that has come down to us is that of the theological poets.1 The Theogony of Hesiod does not look like an authoritative text in the modern sense. There are no deductions and no arguments; Hesiod simply tells us how things are. But this was nonetheless a work of deep wisdom, as every Greek well knew. Hesiod is not a capricious “rhymester,” to use an insult coined by Stephen Dedalus. He is a divine poet who simply tells us how things are, rerum natura. Mythical consciousness is perception itself as a way of thinking, and all myths are simple truths.2 The great power of Hesiod's authority is evidenced by his ban from Kallipolis.3

Proper to the work of a poet, the Theogony begins with an appeal to the Muses, who are not first in time but first in knowing: “Muses of Helicon, let us begin our song with them” (Theog., 1). The Muses are the sources of inspiration for the various human arts. More than this, they are the wellsprings of the wisdom of these arts, the source of Hesiod and Homer's simple truths. Homer's epics are equally contemporary to every age because of his pious deference to the Muse.4 It is not human wisdom but the Muse's wisdom that tells us through Homer the universal history of man. The wise poet or artist must be sure to court the particular Muse set over his or her art. In some traditions, the Muses are the arts that they represent. To name the Muse is to name the art by metonymy.

The Muses are not first in time. Chaos is first in the genealogy of Hesiod, preceding all of the particularized gods and invisible powers. From whence do the Muses spring? Their father is Zeus, king of the later gods, whom they delight with their hymns. Their birthright through Zeus is their authority. Their mother, Hesiod tells us, is Mnemosyne—that is, memory personified (Theog., 52–57). Mnemosyne is conceived, in the earliest poetic wisdom, as the mother, the fountainhead, of all of the human arts. Memory is the first principle of human invention, without which there is only brute existence. The epigraph from Dante at the start of the introduction to the present work shows that the Muses were still thought of as daughters of memory well beyond the Greco-Roman world.

The birthright of the Muses from their mother's side is the ability to sing of “what is and what will be and what has been” (Theog., 38, translation mine). This line of Hesiod, which became a formulaic commonplace in antiquity, is crucial to understanding the foundation of a philosophical doctrine of memory. The Muses have complete knowledge of the whole, and we know that the true is the whole. The modality of this knowledge is necessity. What is, will be, and has been is the object sought by the eros of the philosopher; it is both the true and the good. It is also the proper object of memory. Memory in its philosophical sense is not limited to hindsight, but is rather concerned to envelop the whole, the complete speech. The philosopher must be Prometheus (foresight) as well as Epimetheus (hindsight)—Epimetheus by himself has no gifts for humanity.5 Philosophical memory takes up the past, but not as dead matter. It sees in what it recollects the movement of necessity in things. In using the word “necessity” here, I mean to say that memory is able to root out the inner form and inner movement of its object. This necessary movement is that which obtains in the future just as much as the past. If we grasp the sources of all things past, we also know the sources of present and future things. We know things not just as they appear, but by their essence.

This is not a perverse reading of the meaning of the term “memory”. Philologically, this evidence from Hesiod shows that from the earliest times, the wisdom of Mnemosyne was understood as projecting into all three dimensions of time. The western idea of memory derives from this muthos, or rather from the symbolic form of consciousness that expressed this muthos and knew it to be true. The human arts spring up from Mother Memory; the Muses, children of Memory that guide and direct these arts, are able to guide humanity's institutions because of their memorial knowledge of past, present and future. A one-sided view of memory that limits its sphere to hindsight is a conception that has lost much from the rich ancient understanding of the faculty.

The Muses come to Hesiod and speak their wisdom directly to him. The Muses are muthos personified.6 There is an etymological connection between the words, and a corresponding conceptual connection: the poetic wisdom of myth is the gift of the Muses. They say to Hesiod, “Field-dwelling shepherds, ignoble disgraces, mere bellies: we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things” (Theog., 26–28). Lewis Hyde interprets this passage as indicating that the Muses believe that the human capacity for lying is a result of the human's imperfect condition and submission to the appetites of the stomach.7 Instead, it should be understood as the Muses announcing that they themselves can speak truth or falsehood, when they will. Only the intellect that already knows the whole can properly will to speak true or false. The Muses simultaneously hold all that was, is, and shall be in memory. Their decision to speak true or false to mankind is determined by man's status as an appetitive creature. They are prudent in their revelations. To Zeus, they always sing truly (Theog., 36–38); mortal man must beware, but to man they can sing truly if they will. T. S. Eliot joins to this a second warning for those who would court the divine sisters: “Anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted.”8

There is another significant claim that Hesiod makes about the Muses, one which must not be taken to contradict their genealogy. He says that the nature of the Muses is “forgetfulness of evils and relief from anxieties” (Theog., 55). How can the daughters of Mnemosyne have a nature of forgetfulness? This anticipates the philosophical doctrine of forgetting that I will articulate in the fourth chapter. These two items, “forgetfulness of evils” and “relief from anxieties,” are not separate, juxtaposed things, but are one and the same. An indiscriminate memory that cannot forget is cut off from happiness. Happiness must embrace what is at hand, which is why it is so fleeting in this finite life. A capacity for forgetfulness is the condition (necessary, but not sufficient) for taking pleasure in life. Pleasure requires discrimination and judgment. There can be no freedom from cares or evils if these evils are at all times living, haunting images without relief.

The power to forget always depends upon the power to remember; again we find that the opposites touch one another. To say that the nature of the Muses is forgetfulness is at the same time to say that their nature is memory. It is to have a vital memory rather than one fixed in petrifaction. The Muses know all, but because they are divine they are able to forget when they will, just as they are able to speak falsely when they will. To deprive these goddesses of the art of forgetting would be to condemn them to unhappiness, and to give humankind an excellence lacking to divinity.

The veil of Isis

Much earlier than the Greek wisdom tradition, the dominant locus of Western mythical knowledge was Egypt. I wish to turn to a discussion of the goddess Isis, not in her original Egyptian context, but as transmitted to the Greek world. I am not here concerned with the popular story most associated with Isis: that of her role in the story of the death and resurrection of her brother and husband, Osiris.9 This myth is interesting in its own right, but the importance of Isis in the present work concerns only her portrayal in the ancient European wisdom tradition.

This goddess is mentioned twice by Herodotus, who had visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE. At one point in his treatment of Egypt in the Histories, he mentions that cows are sacred to her and that her statues often portray her with a cow's horns (Hist., II. 41). Later, he writes of a temple and festival at Busiris that honor the goddess. In this passage, he equates her to the goddess Demeter (Hist., II. 60–61).10 Demeter, whose counterpart in Roman mythology is Ceres, is the Greek goddess of the harvest and fertility, mother of Persephone.

Five centuries later, Plutarch, who had also visited Egypt at one point, composed De Iside et Osiride, a much more extensive treatment of Isis than that of Herodotus. Though cults of Isis had already sprung up in Greece by 330 BCE, this work, however inaccurate it may have been in its portrayal of Egyptian culture, was partially responsible for enflaming the ensuing European interest in these deities.11 Plutarch writes: “Many writers have held [Isis] to be the daughter of Hermes, and many others the daughter of Prometheus, because of the belief that Prometheus is the discoverer of wisdom and forethought, and Hermes the invent...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Recovery of Memory
• PART ONE: THEORY
• Section One: The Idea of Memory
• I: The Origins of Wisdom
• II: What Memory as Philosophy is Not
• III: Memory as Philosophy
• IV: Forgetting
• V: Memory in the Technological World
• PART TWO: HISTORY
• Section Two: The Memory Tradition
• VI: The Speculative Line
• VII: The Technical Line
• VIII: Theatrum Mundi
• Section Three: Memory in Modernity
• IX: Montaigne's Monstrous Memory
• X: Writing and Memory
• XI: Memory versus Modernity
• XII: Descartes and His Children
• XIII: Hegel's Philosophy of Erinnerung
• XIV: Hegel's Later Works
• Postface
• Bibliography
• Studies in Historical Philosophy
• Copyright